More on cemeteries

When working for the Paris, Texas, newspaper, I wrote quite a few stories on rural cemeteries. In the Bogata Cemetery a five-foot-tall narrow tombstone marks the grave of a man who died in 1882, or as is inscribed on the stone: MURDRED. A day or so after the cemetery story ran in the newspaper, I got a call from a woman who said the murdered man was her grandfather. She said, “All we know is that one night he answered a knock at the door and when he opened the door, someone shot him with a shotgun.” The man’s wife was named on the tombstone, but the woman who called me said, “We do not know what happened to his wife.” That was an unusual way to refer to a grandmother.

A similar tombstone for William R. Lay in Simmons Cemetery near Ben Franklin in Delta County notes the deceased was MURDERED on 13 June 1876, but news stories and historians all agree that the killer was Texas gunman Bill Longley.